“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” -Reichsminister Joseph Goebbels

Sunday, February 1, 2009

UNRWA staff not tested for terror ties

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees does little to check whether its staff or clients are terrorists, its former chief attorney, James Lindsay, says in a newly published report.

Allegations linking terrorists to UNRWA are not new. Israel has said many times its troops were fired on by gunmen using UNRWA facilities, that UNRWA vehicles transported weapons and that some of its staff members were terrorists.

UNRWA has denied those charges and Israel has often retracted them or found them hard to prove.

This latest claim against UNRWA, contained in a 67-page critique of the organization published at the end of January by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has more authority behind it, because Lindsay was a senior lawyer for UNRWA from 2000 to 2007.

The issue, Lindsay wrote, is not intention but oversight.

"UNRWA has taken very few steps to detect and eliminate terrorists from the ranks of its staff or its beneficiaries, and no steps at all to prevent members of terrorist organizations such as Hamas from joining its staff," he wrote.

"These failings have occurred not because UNRWA consciously supports terrorism but rather because it is not particularly concerned about the issue. Its main focus [is] the provision of services and protection of Palestinian refugees," he wrote.

UNRWA's Jerusalem spokesman Chris Gunness said in response that his organization had "a rigorous approach to ensuring that its staff are not involved in militant or political activity" and that it took the matter very seriously.

Lindsay wrote that UNRWA did not have the means to ensure there was no terrorism in its midst.

"Even if terrorism constituted a greater concern, the agency is not equipped to undertake the extensive security investigations that a thoroughgoing anti-terrorism effort would require," he said.

Lindsay cited examples of past charges against UNRWA staff, including a 2002 UNRWA driver who was accused - but never charged - with carrying weapons in an ambulance and a Gaza headmaster employed by UNRWA who was also an explosives experts for Islamic Jihad. The headmaster was killed by Israel last year.

UNRWA has no preemployment security checks and does not monitor off-time behavior to ensure compliance with the organization's anti-terrorist rules, Lindsay wrote.

"Evidence of area staff members who have had second jobs with Hamas or with other terrorist groups does occasionally come to light," he wrote.

Even so, Lindsay noted, of the 5,000 UNRWA staff who worked in the West Bank and the 10,000 in the Gaza Strip, most of whom were Palestinians, few had been convicted of terrorism-related charges.

Staff members, however, had been involved in political activity, wrote Lindsay. In particular he quoted the organization's past commissioner-general Peter Hansen, who in 2004 said, "I am sure there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll and I don't see that as a crime. Hamas as a political organization does not mean that every member is a militant and we do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion as against another."

UNRWA has said in response that its staff were prohibited from any political involvement.

The bulk of Lindsay's report, however, focused on operational suggestions to de-politicize and change the organization's mission and to cut down on its list of 4.5 million refugees.

UNRWA was created in 1949 by General Assembly Resolution 302 and began operation in May 1950 to service what at the time was 957,000 refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, many of whom been rendered homeless or jobless by the 1948-49 war with Israel, according to Lindsay.

That number was higher than the initial UN list of 726,000 refugees recorded in the immediate aftermath of the war, he wrote.

Initially, UNRWA provided immediate relief with an aim to integrate the refugees into their host countries.

Both the refugees and the Arab states opposed the idea of integration. By the late 1950s it had been disregarded in favor of servicing the refugees, including offering developmental services in areas such as education, health, welfare, microfinance and urban planning.

UNRWA also expanded its definition of a refugee to include those patrilineal descendants of the original refugees.

Since the 1970s, more than half of the organization's budget has gone to education. In 2007, for example, $282 million of UNRWA's $545m. budget went to educate 480,000 children, according to Lindsay.

Similarly, 21,962 of its 29,000 staff members work in UNRWA schools. Fifteen percent to 20% of its budget goes to health services, for which $106m. was earmarked in the 2007 budget.

But not all those serviced by UNRWA need the organization, Lindsay wrote in his study, particularly given that a majority of them have been resettled.

In Jordan, where 2 million Palestinian refugees live, all but 167,000 have citizenship, and are fully eligible for government services including education and health care.

To continue to call citizens of recognized states refugees is suspect and suggests "that the agency's continued existence is due at least in part to political purposes" even though UNRWA was not designed as a political organization, Lindsay said.

Eliminating UNRWA services in Jordan to all but the 167,000 noncitizens could reduce its refugee list by 40%, Lindsay said.

In deciding to whom UNRWA provides services, it assesses "refugee status," not need, he wrote.

Some recipients of aid could afford to pay for the services they now received for free, he wrote.

The decision to allow for a growing refugee population had become a political statement that fostered and supported the Palestinian demand to return to Israel, he wrote.

UNRWA, he said, did this even though the United States, its largest single donor, did not support the right of Palestinian return to within Israel's pre-1967 border.

While some critics have demanded that the organization be disbanded, Lindsay called for it to be reformed. UNRWA's programs, he said, had insured that the population it serviced did not suffer from lack of basic needs.

What is Cultural Marxism?

Lets Not Kid Ourselves

About Islam

You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, "The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."

Palestinians are a myth, we are just saudis and egyptians

How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

Ronald Reagan -Remarks in Arlington, Virginia, September 25, 1987

Anti-Israel Muslim Student Activist Exposed

These are possibly the 5 best sentences you'll ever read:

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.

2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!

5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

50 million muslims In Europe and 80% are living on welfare

“Most people who read "The Communist Manifesto" probably have no idea that it was written by a couple of young men who had never worked a day in their lives, and who nevertheless spoke boldly in the name of "the workers"

Thomas Sowell

Search This Blog

"Those who rely simply on the weight of authority to prove any assertion, without searching out the arguments to support it, act absurdly. I wish to question freely and to answer freely without any sort of adulation. That well becomes any who are sincere in the search for truth"